When you hear a member of Congress talking about the tech industry these days, there’s a good chance it’s in a negative context. Republicans rail against the companies that have enabled everyday citizens to project their voices with a freedom and scope that even presidents could not have matched just a couple decades ago. Democrats rhapsodize about dismantling some…
I’ll be speaking with Michael Dell at a Village Global event later this week. The event is private, but since I was impressed by Michael’s latest book, Play Nice But Win, I want to share some of my thoughts about it with a wider audience. So here are five key takeaways that resonated with me from Michael’s highly entertaining…
Bitter political partisanship continues to divide America. Devastating wildfires, floods, and hurricanes leave no part of the country untouched. Rapid technological innovation has altered global business patterns and relationships, and left individual workers, companies, and even entire industries wondering what the future holds for them. Now throw in a global pandemic. It’s not an environment…
Attracting investment is such a fundamental part of entrepreneurship that it’s easy to think about it with less nuance than one should. After all, the job of investors is to invest. And their incentive to do so is clear – they’re looking for a big financial return on their investment. So what’s to over-think? If…
More than 122 million lives saved. Hundreds of millions people lifted out of extreme poverty. Over the course of its existence, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has helped drive massive positive outcomes like that by focusing on what it calls “actionable measurement” – aka a commitment to collecting and analyzing data about its activities and interventions, and then…
Fred Kofman’s new book, The Meaning Revolution In 2012, after LinkedIn went public and the size of our global workforce was growing rapidly, our CEO Jeff Weiner convinced Fred Kofman to join our team as Vice President of Leadership and Organizational Development. Jeff and Fred had been working together since the mid-2000s — when Jeff…
For decades, John Doerr has been the leading evangelist for using objectives and key results (OKRs) to manage world-changing organizations. John has helped spread OKRs from Intel, where he learned the technique from the legendary Andy Grove, to organizations like Google and the Gates Foundation, to present-day startups like Zume (where robots and algorithms help…
A review of Eric Motley’s Madison Park In 2005, Eric Motley decided to leave his job at the White House, where he worked as Deputy Associate Director of the Office of Presidential Personnel. Like all departing White House staffers, Eric had an opportunity to pose for a photo with his boss, George W. Bush, to mark…
The Seventh Sense will help you develop a feel for the Networked Age As Joshua Cooper Ramo suggests in his important new book, The Seventh Sense, massively scaled, always-on connection changes the nature of objects and institutions. A heart-rate monitor that shares information with a million other heart-rate monitors functions differently than one that operates in standalone fashion. The…
Imagine yourself one hundred years from now. Yes, you’re still alive, breathing through genetically engineered pig lungs, and having dinner at your favorite restaurant. A robot waiter rolls up to refill your glass of wine, which is equipped with a sensor that allows the restaurant to automatically deduct $10 from your Bitcoin account. Your companion, who doesn’t actually…
In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, the ability to extract key information before your competitors do is a crucial advantage. As I’ve written elsewhere, search literacy is not enough to succeed in this world. You need network literacy too. And that means developing your aptitude for reading how information flows through different networks of alliance and…
In his book Zero to One, my friend and former colleague Peter Thiel lays out an ingenious, provocative, and highly entertaining argument regarding the virtues of monopoly and the shortcomings of competition. He makes his case so deftly that I suspect it will soon attain the implacable majesty of conventional wisdom. That would be a shame.…
Over the next decade and a half, 2.5 billion people in China, India, and other developing countries will join the global middle class. They are going to need skyscrapers to live in and super-stores to shop in. They are going to want smartphones, cars, flank steaks, air conditioning, pet clothing, Disneyland vacations, and probably some…